Les Misérables by Victor Hugo
CHAPTER IV—THE EBULLITIONS OF FORMER DAYS
1948 words | Chapter 348
Nothing is more extraordinary than the first breaking out of a riot.
Everything bursts forth everywhere at once. Was it foreseen? Yes. Was
it prepared? No. Whence comes it? From the pavements. Whence falls it?
From the clouds. Here insurrection assumes the character of a plot;
there of an improvisation. The first comer seizes a current of the
throng and leads it whither he wills. A beginning full of terror, in
which is mingled a sort of formidable gayety. First come clamors, the
shops are closed, the displays of the merchants disappear; then come
isolated shots; people flee; blows from gun-stocks beat against
portes-cochères, servants can be heard laughing in the courtyards of
houses and saying: “There’s going to be a row!”
A quarter of an hour had not elapsed when this is what was taking place
at twenty different spots in Paris at once.
In the Rue Sainte-Croix-de-la-Bretonnerie, twenty young men, bearded
and with long hair, entered a dram-shop and emerged a moment later,
carrying a horizontal tricolored flag covered with crape, and having at
their head three men armed, one with a sword, one with a gun, and the
third with a pike.
In the Rue des Nonaindières, a very well-dressed bourgeois, who had a
prominent belly, a sonorous voice, a bald head, a lofty brow, a black
beard, and one of these stiff moustaches which will not lie flat,
offered cartridges publicly to passers-by.
In the Rue Saint-Pierre-Montmartre, men with bare arms carried about a
black flag, on which could be read in white letters this inscription:
“Republic or Death!” In the Rue des Jeûneurs, Rue du Cadran, Rue
Montorgueil, Rue Mandar, groups appeared waving flags on which could be
distinguished in gold letters, the word _section_ with a number. One of
these flags was red and blue with an almost imperceptible stripe of
white between.
They pillaged a factory of small-arms on the Boulevard Saint-Martin,
and three armorers’ shops, the first in the Rue Beaubourg, the second
in the Rue Michel-le-Comte, the other in the Rue du Temple. In a few
minutes, the thousand hands of the crowd had seized and carried off two
hundred and thirty guns, nearly all double-barrelled, sixty-four
swords, and eighty-three pistols. In order to provide more arms, one
man took the gun, the other the bayonet.
Opposite the Quai de la Grève, young men armed with muskets installed
themselves in the houses of some women for the purpose of firing. One
of them had a flint-lock. They rang, entered, and set about making
cartridges. One of these women relates: “I did not know what cartridges
were; it was my husband who told me.”
One cluster broke into a curiosity shop in the Rue des
Vieilles-Haudriettes, and seized yataghans and Turkish arms.
The body of a mason who had been killed by a gun-shot lay in the Rue de
la Perle.
And then on the right bank, the left bank, on the quays, on the
boulevards, in the Latin country, in the quarter of the Halles, panting
men, artisans, students, members of sections read proclamations and
shouted: “To arms!” broke street lanterns, unharnessed carriages,
unpaved the streets, broke in the doors of houses, uprooted trees,
rummaged cellars, rolled out hogsheads, heaped up paving-stones, rough
slabs, furniture and planks, and made barricades.
They forced the bourgeois to assist them in this. They entered the
dwellings of women, they forced them to hand over the swords and guns
of their absent husbands, and they wrote on the door, with whiting:
“The arms have been delivered”; some signed “their names” to receipts
for the guns and swords and said: “Send for them to-morrow at the
Mayor’s office.” They disarmed isolated sentinels and National
Guardsmen in the streets on their way to the Townhall. They tore the
epaulets from officers. In the Rue du Cimitière-Saint-Nicholas, an
officer of the National Guard, on being pursued by a crowd armed with
clubs and foils, took refuge with difficulty in a house, whence he was
only able to emerge at nightfall and in disguise.
In the Quartier Saint-Jacques, the students swarmed out of their hotels
and ascended the Rue Saint-Hyacinthe to the Café du Progrèss, or
descended to the Café des Sept-Billards, in the Rue des Mathurins.
There, in front of the door, young men mounted on the stone
corner-posts, distributed arms. They plundered the timber-yard in the
Rue Transnonain in order to obtain material for barricades. On a single
point the inhabitants resisted, at the corner of the Rue Sainte-Avoye
and the Rue Simon-Le-Franc, where they destroyed the barricade with
their own hands. At a single point the insurgents yielded; they
abandoned a barricade begun in the Rue de Temple after having fired on
a detachment of the National Guard, and fled through the Rue de la
Corderie. The detachment picked up in the barricade a red flag, a
package of cartridges, and three hundred pistol-balls. The National
Guardsmen tore up the flag, and carried off its tattered remains on the
points of their bayonets.
All that we are here relating slowly and successively took place
simultaneously at all points of the city in the midst of a vast tumult,
like a mass of tongues of lightning in one clap of thunder. In less
than an hour, twenty-seven barricades sprang out of the earth in the
quarter of the Halles alone. In the centre was that famous house No.
50, which was the fortress of Jeanne and her six hundred companions,
and which, flanked on the one hand by a barricade at Saint-Merry, and
on the other by a barricade of the Rue Maubuée, commanded three
streets, the Rue des Arcis, the Rue Saint-Martin, and the Rue
Aubry-le-Boucher, which it faced. The barricades at right angles fell
back, the one of the Rue Montorgueil on the Grande-Truanderie, the
other of the Rue Geoffroy-Langevin on the Rue Sainte-Avoye. Without
reckoning innumerable barricades in twenty other quarters of Paris, in
the Marais, at Mont-Sainte-Geneviève; one in the Rue Ménilmontant,
where was visible a porte-cochère torn from its hinges; another near
the little bridge of the Hôtel-Dieu made with an “écossais,” which had
been unharnessed and overthrown, three hundred paces from the
Prefecture of Police.
At the barricade of the Rue des Ménétriers, a well-dressed man
distributed money to the workmen. At the barricade of the Rue Grenetat,
a horseman made his appearance and handed to the one who seemed to be
the commander of the barricade what had the appearance of a roll of
silver. “Here,” said he, “this is to pay expenses, wine, et cætera.” A
light-haired young man, without a cravat, went from barricade to
barricade, carrying pass-words. Another, with a naked sword, a blue
police cap on his head, placed sentinels. In the interior, beyond the
barricades, the wine-shops and porters’ lodges were converted into
guard-houses. Otherwise the riot was conducted after the most
scientific military tactics. The narrow, uneven, sinuous streets, full
of angles and turns, were admirably chosen; the neighborhood of the
Halles, in particular, a network of streets more intricate than a
forest. The Society of the Friends of the People had, it was said,
undertaken to direct the insurrection in the Quartier Sainte-Avoye. A
man killed in the Rue du Ponceau who was searched had on his person a
plan of Paris.
That which had really undertaken the direction of the uprising was a
sort of strange impetuosity which was in the air. The insurrection had
abruptly built barricades with one hand, and with the other seized
nearly all the posts of the garrison. In less than three hours, like a
train of powder catching fire, the insurgents had invaded and occupied,
on the right bank, the Arsenal, the Mayoralty of the Place Royale, the
whole of the Marais, the Popincourt arms manufactory, la Galiote, the
Château-d’Eau, and all the streets near the Halles; on the left bank,
the barracks of the Veterans, Sainte-Pélagie, the Place Maubert, the
powder magazine of the Deux-Moulins, and all the barriers. At five
o’clock in the evening, they were masters of the Bastille, of the
Lingerie, of the Blancs-Manteaux; their scouts had reached the Place
des Victoires, and menaced the Bank, the Petits-Pères barracks, and the
Post-Office. A third of Paris was in the hands of the rioters.
The conflict had been begun on a gigantic scale at all points; and, as
a result of the disarming domiciliary visits, and armorers’ shops
hastily invaded, was, that the combat which had begun with the throwing
of stones was continued with gun-shots.
About six o’clock in the evening, the Passage du Saumon became the
field of battle. The uprising was at one end, the troops were at the
other. They fired from one gate to the other. An observer, a dreamer,
the author of this book, who had gone to get a near view of this
volcano, found himself in the passage between the two fires. All that
he had to protect him from the bullets was the swell of the two
half-columns which separate the shops; he remained in this delicate
situation for nearly half an hour.
Meanwhile the call to arms was beaten, the National Guard armed in
haste, the legions emerged from the Mayoralities, the regiments from
their barracks. Opposite the passage de l’Ancre a drummer received a
blow from a dagger. Another, in the Rue du Cygne, was assailed by
thirty young men who broke his instrument, and took away his sword.
Another was killed in the Rue Grenier-Saint-Lazare. In the Rue
Michel-le-Comte, three officers fell dead one after the other. Many of
the Municipal Guards, on being wounded, in the Rue des Lombards,
retreated.
In front of the Cour-Batave, a detachment of National Guards found a
red flag bearing the following inscription: _Republican revolution, No.
127_. Was this a revolution, in fact?
The insurrection had made of the centre of Paris a sort of
inextricable, tortuous, colossal citadel.
There was the hearth; there, evidently, was the question. All the rest
was nothing but skirmishes. The proof that all would be decided there
lay in the fact that there was no fighting going on there as yet.
In some regiments, the soldiers were uncertain, which added to the
fearful uncertainty of the crisis. They recalled the popular ovation
which had greeted the neutrality of the 53d of the Line in July, 1830.
Two intrepid men, tried in great wars, the Marshal Lobau and General
Bugeaud, were in command, Bugeaud under Lobau. Enormous patrols,
composed of battalions of the Line, enclosed in entire companies of the
National Guard, and preceded by a commissary of police wearing his
scarf of office, went to reconnoitre the streets in rebellion. The
insurgents, on their side, placed videttes at the corners of all open
spaces, and audaciously sent their patrols outside the barricades. Each
side was watching the other. The Government, with an army in its hand,
hesitated; the night was almost upon them, and the Saint-Merry tocsin
began to make itself heard. The Minister of War at that time, Marshal
Soult, who had seen Austerlitz, regarded this with a gloomy air.
These old sailors, accustomed to correct manœuvres and having as
resource and guide only tactics, that compass of battles, are utterly
disconcerted in the presence of that immense foam which is called
public wrath.
The National Guards of the suburbs rushed up in haste and disorder. A
battalion of the 12th Light came at a run from Saint-Denis, the 14th of
the Line arrived from Courbevoie, the batteries of the Military School
had taken up their position on the Carrousel; cannons were descending
from Vincennes.
Solitude was formed around the Tuileries. Louis Philippe was perfectly
serene.
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